Womanhood
Bethan Davies
Womanhood
Womanhood Self published by Bethan Davies Writer & Editor Bethan Davies Publication Design Bethan Davies All images Š The Artists All texts Š The Authors All Rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without permission of the publisher. Published January 2021
Contents Introduction Tania Franco Klein Gillian Wearing Juno Calypso Anja Niemi Conclusion
The word womanhood is defined as ‘the state of being a woman’ (Definition of WOMANHOOD, n.d.), simply that the word needs no other definition than being of the female gender. Although the definition of the word is remarkably simple, the connotations that come with the word womanhood refer to a woman’s qualities, even though there is no one way to categorise every woman in the world into one word. The word womanhood is designed to do just that, it is meant to be a general word that describes all women and how they should act and behave in the presence of others. The constructed qualities of a woman that come along with that word, that all women are gentle and sensitive and delicate, have grown over time. There was not simply one day where women were not these things and then suddenly a day where they were, it happened gradually and was enforced over time. As the development of these suggested qualities happened over time, it is only fitting that its deconstruction takes time, the years that these rules hung over women would force years of effort to remove them. Along with the constructed qualities of womanhood there is also the role of a woman in familial life that was twisted into control, women are intended to take on the passive role in a family and must do all that the leader says. Within this work are examples of women either taking control or wanting to, the women no longer wish to be passive. 3
The Untravelled Suitcase (2018)
4
Another idea included within womanhood is the thought that showing signs of age is bad, women are encouraged to continue looking as close to a teenager as they can despite the signs of natural ageing. Girls are sold products that stop them from looking older as soon as they are able to understand advertisements, for women it is seen as a horror when your skin begins to wrinkle. These suggestions that all women are gentle and sensitive and should never age past a certain point is something that simply cannot be acomplished, with the ever-increasing number of people on the planet and the fact that each individual person has different life experiences there is no way to refer to all women through collective qualities.
5
If a woman was made to be all of this at once, then she would tire from performing very quickly. 6
Female artists have been creating artwork for as long as they had the ability, and women have been the subject of artwork for just as long. All work where the main subject is a woman, or the creator is a woman, will feature the ideas of womanhood and its connotations. There is simply no way to avoid the years of stereotypes that have been pushed upon those of the female gender, an artist may set out to create work that has no reference to a woman being delicate but by ignoring those constructed qualities of women that have been present for years they are bringing them into question and into attention. Although ignoring the suggested qualities pulls light onto them, there is a way to display those stereotypes in a way that is challenging their existence.
7
Many photographers and artists have been taking these ideas of womanhood and stereotypes of femininity and stripping them down to deconstruct them and address the fact that we have tried to push the meaning of being a woman into such a small box for so many years as well as how these ideas affect them and other women. These artists create work to explain the exhaustion of living in a world where your every moment is scrutinised by a set of invisible rules that have been growing since long before you were born. 8
Womanhood
9
Tania Franco Klein
10
The Window (2017)
11
The first artist being looked at in this work for her ability to deconstruct womanhood and its stereotypes is photographer Tania Franco Klein, who began her photography practice alongside her BA in Architecture in Mexico City, this encouraged her to pursue a Masters in Photography at the University of the Arts London. Tania Franco Klein’s work Our life in the shadows, is a piece that was created to challenge the American Dream lifestyle that had been pushed upon women, the idea that they must be constantly performing to portray the perfect life. This idea involved women being loving mothers and wives while doing all the housework and ensuring that everyone in the family was happy, in this dream women are not allowed to show emotion other than happiness. The work challenges the idea of the perfect example of womanhood by creating characters that meet and vanish as though looking for any possible escape they can find, from looking at the work you get the sense that the women are tired and exhausted. There are no happy faces found throughout the work, instead there are just the sleepy figures looking out and away from the camera. Klein’s work is very intimate, and the framing and positioning of the characters seems so incredibly personal to each woman, as though you are watching a moment in these women’s lives that you are not meant to see. This is an instance of them letting their mask down and taking a moment to sigh. 12
The way that the camera is observing these characters makes you think that these women are taking a second to themselves out of their day and putting down the mask of perfection that they would otherwise be portraying, not that they are relaxing but rather that they are simply tired and need a break from performing the constant task of acting happy. This work is not about showing a direct opposition to the ideas that women are delicate and soft but rather showing women that are taking a moment away from pretending to be soft and delicate, women who need a break from performing. Klein’s work is showing us not a world where women do not have these qualities but rather a world where they are tired with pretending that they have them constantly. The framing of each image tells you that you are not seeing this life through her own eyes or even that of another person, instead that you are simply present in the exact moment that she has chosen to take a break. With this, you get the feeling that you have interrupted an incredibly personal moment. That perhaps this is something that you are not meant to see. The viewer gets these feelings because it is expected that a woman looks perfect or that she is at least trying to keep happy for those around her. Klein takes this expectation and throws it back, instead choosing to focus on those sad, tired moments where the act fails, and the mask falls away. 13
You as the audience can see that these are women who are exhausted and are taking a moment to themselves, this is Klein asking you to think about whether it is normal for a woman to spend her whole life pretending in front of others. When using the expectations of womanhood to view these images you immediately know that this is a moment that you were not meant to see. As well as the feeling of pure exhaustion you can feel radiating off these women, you get a sense of anxiety and isolation. These are women who are staring off camera and out at seemingly nothing, they are deeply lost in their own thoughts as you watch them. With the fact that each image sees the back of a woman’s head or her face looking away from the camera, you begin to form feelings of anxiety yourself as you can almost hear each thought going around in the women’s minds. You can begin to place yourself into their shoes, exhausted and alone in a place where you are too tired to continue.
17
Dead End (2016)
18
Womanhood
19
Gillian Wearing
20
We then move onto Gillian Wearing, an artist whose every piece of work is based upon the idea of performing someone else’s life. Wearing is an English conceptual artist, the photographs featuring in this book are a selection of her self-portraits. The project is about taking the skin of another and wearing it yourself, so that Gillian Wearing becomes a completely different person. While Klein deals with the perceived mask of beauty that is forced upon women, Wearing deals with literal masks that hide people. Wearing makes incredibly detailed masks of her family members as well as herself when she was younger and wears them. The work can be called self-portraiture as they are photographs she has taken of herself, but with these masks over her face you begin to question what exactly a self-portrait is. If she no longer looks like herself but rather her father when she takes the image, then is the image still a photograph of her? In these photographs Wearing can be anyone she likes and is not tied down to gender or age, she shows this as she becomes the younger version of her father. The images are about her family and their lives, she takes each image as an opportunity to forget herself and become a different person. Doing this frees her from the pressures of womanhood on herself and allows to be someone else. 22
Wearing does not intend for the images to be read as part of a continuous project but rather with each image as its own individual art piece, this is seen through the presentation and framing of each photograph. Some images appear in colour while others are shown in black and white, the image of her dressed up as a younger version of herself tells the story of her life at that time. Wearing bases each image on an existing image of that person, this image of Wearing dressed as herself at age 17 was derived from a photobooth image of herself in the early 80s. This image is important as you can see fear and anxiety in Wearing’s eyes and face. When speaking about the image, Wearing talks about how although she was self-conscious at that time she was also ‘very aware of my image’ (Gillian Wearing takeover: behind the mask – the Self Portraits, 2012), with this you begin to look at the image as though it was a teenager who is worried about what other people think. When Wearing is portraying her younger self she delves into the standards that women and specifically teenage girls, you can see this from the way that she is stood rigidly as though she is being observed and scrutinised as women often are. This image in particular also speaks of the beauty standards for women, the fact that society pushes women to constantly look younger.
23
Young Wearing is affected by the stereotypes of womanhood, she is a teenager in this image and is almost an adult. The image is about her thoughts as a teenager, you see her anxiety and her fear in her eyes and posing. She explains that she was taking the original photograph to simply ‘look at how I looked that day’ (Gillian Wearing takeover: behind the mask – the Self Portraits, 2012), falling victim to curiosity and vanity. With this, you see that Wearing is not deconstructing the stereotypes of womanhood but rather addressing it straight on, that yes, Wearing did care how she looked. However, she did this for herself, she was not making herself look good for others around her, in fact she feared the other around her. The recreation of this image shows a scared girl who is looking at her appearance for herself and no one else.
25
When viewing the work without knowing the story behind each image you see that each image is a photograph of someone who is around 19, the only exception being her grandparents who Wearing could not find enough photographic examples of at age 19 to create masks. Due to the fact that every person she is becoming is younger than 25 there is no sense of who is who in the family. Wearings grandmother is portrayed as being a child despite being the eldest in the series. The familial roles, and what stereotypes they bring with them, have been erased as each person is taken back in time. Wearing destroys the familial stereotypes placed upon these people and takes them down to simply being affected by gender stereotypes. You see Wearing’s father dressed formally in a tuxedo, the formal clothing suggests power and control. Wearing herself is dressed in a shirt with a vest which she describes as her work uniform, this uniform is not as formal as her fathers tuxedo and instead shows her as a worker, matched with her messy hair you can tell that she is young. Wearing’s mother is wearing a casual shirt with pointed collar and padded shoulders with her hair curled and brushed smooth, suggesting that the photograph was planned for and that she dressed up nicely for it, this neatness of her outfit and hair tells us that she cares abotu how she looks. By far the most casual image would be of Wearings’s grandmother, as she gazes at the camera with a bored expression that children have mastered. 26
Womanhood
29
Juno Calypso
30
The next artist whose work is being looked at is Juno Calypso, a London based artist who works in photography, film and installation art. Her photography work features around one character, Joyce and how she cares for herself. The series began while Calypso was studying photography at London College of Communication where she dressed up and became Joyce. The bulk of her work featuring Joyce was created around 2015 when Calypso travelled to America posing as a travel writer to visit and shoot in a romantic honeymoon themed hotel. As such, the name of this project is The Honeymoon, Calypso also has a project that specifically revolves around Joyce which is named after the character while her other projects are about why Joyce is in those environments and how Joyce interacts with the environments. The other project featuring Joyce that will be included in this writing is What to do With A Million Years, a piece of work that was taken in an underground bunker in Las Vegas built by the CEO of Avon cosmetics in the 70s, the fact that the bunker was built by the CEO of a beauty company is solid evidence of this work revolving around the ideas of beauty. 32
Beauty is a feature in all of Calypsos work, as you follow Joyce in her exploration of both her own personality and the locations she is staying at. The photos vary from Joyce staring deep into a mirror that reflects multiple versions of herself back to her using beauty products designed to keep a woman looking young. Multiple photos of Joyce in the series show her using a plastic mask over her face, this is a mask that is designed to send small electric pulses through your skin in an attempt to keep skin clear and looking young, this relates back to the idea that is forced on women that ageing is bad. Age is an issue that women struggle with as ‘we live in a society that values youth and views old age as a period of decline’ (FEMINISM, AGING, AND THE LIFE COURSE PERSPECTIVE, 2007), and as such we are near constantly being sold products to make your skin appear younger and reduce or remove wrinkles. This cult like idea of ageing being a disastrous thing and that we should do everything we can to stop any evidence that a woman’s skin is not still as smooth as the day she was born is brought back from when discussed in relation to Wearings face masks and instead put into the context of Calypsos facemasks.
35
Untitled (2016)
36
The Honeymoon Suite (2015)
37
These images of Joyce using treatments to keep her skin fresh give us the sense that she is performing for someone, ensuring that she looks perfect and presentable for this person. However, the story of Joyce is that she went to these locations alone, this takes the idea from a woman performing for those around her and rather to a woman performing for her own pleasure. Joyce is using this stay away to treat herself for herself alone, this is emphasised in the shots of her gazing into the mirror and the multiple Joyce’s staring back to meet her gaze. Joyce is not a woman that is improving herself for anyone other than her own eyes. Calypso created Joyce as a ‘bored, frustrated, lonely housewife’ (Juno Calypso’s one-woman world tour of honeymoon hotels, 2015), Joyce had grown tired of waiting for her husband to take her somewhere so took it into her own hands. The project is all about Joyce taking the active role rather than the passive role that women are taught to have. Although the photos show Joyce as a powerful woman who spends hours caring for herself, the images have the same air of loneliness as Tania Franco Klein’s work as Joyce stares into her own reflection. You can almost see in Joyce’s face the sadness that she is spending this trip alone in some photos, while in others you get the flashes of power. 38
Joyce (2015) 39
A Dream In Green (2015) 40
Womanhood
41
Anja Niemi
42
43
She Could Have Been A Cowboy (2018)
The final artist whose work is being looked at is Anja Niemi, a Norwegian artist and photographer, her work focuses on narrative storytelling. Her pursuit of photography began at a young age as a way for her to give sight to the stories that were playing in her head as she struggled with words, photography was a way for her to express herself. Niemi’s photographs rely heavily on location and often include intricately detailed rooms as shooting locations. The project we are focusing on in this writing is She Could Have Been A Cowboy, a series exploring a fictional character that is trapped in one life and wanting another. The work is not too dissimilar to Juno Calypso’s work featuring Joyce, although Niemi’s character remains nameless. Niemi says that ‘the story is not really about being a cowboy. It’s about wanting to be another’ (Connelly and Connelly, 2018). This work is not about that woman specifically wanting to be a cowboy, but rather that she is dreaming of something else. She is thinking of different options she could take and different routes she would go down had her life gone a different path. Niemi is both the photographer and the subject of the photographs giving her a closer connection to the photographs and the ability to become exactly the character she needs without having to explain it to someone else. 44
She Could Have Been A Cowboy is a series of images that reflect each other, the photographs of the cowboy alone have a matching photograph of the woman in pink. While the photographs of the two of them show them close but not quite touching. These images were designed to go together and match up well, they were not designed to be seen individually. Within the work we see a nameless woman in a pink lace dress, the connotations of this being that she is a very feminine woman derived from the pink fabric while the lace gives the implication that she is delicate. This implication that she is delicate is continued by the soft gloves covering her hands and the fact that her posing shows her as small with her turned to the side rather than turned fully away from the camera. This pose is emphasising the small size of her waist.
45
The matching image of the cowboy shows us power and confidence seen in the pose, one hand holding the jacket over her shoulder while the other is near her pocket. Her body is all facing one direction in this image while in the pink image you see her twisted in almost fear and anxiousness. These images are addressing the views of womanhood and showing that a woman could be anything, that she does not need to be delicate and small. She could stand tall with her jacket draped over her shoulder; she is allowed to be confident. In these images the woman’s face is always concealed, hidden not because she is scared as her face remains covered in the cowboy images, but because there is no reason that she should have a face. The woman and the cowboy could be anyone who has been told that they cannot do something, it is simply a woman fantasising of being someone else. 48
49
The Imaginary Cowboy (2018)
The other part of this work that relates back to the ideas of womanhood would be the title of the work itself which can be read in many ways, She Could Have Been A Cowboy. The work is not titled She Could Have Been A Cowgirl but rather a Cowboy, what this implies is that she does not care what she is just that she wants to be someone else, we can tell this from the fact that cowboy is the term that people use when talking about the wild west. Had Niemi used cowgirl instead then the work would be saying that she wants to be specifically a cowgirl. However, another way to read it would be that it is leaning back to times of childhood when girls are often told that they cannot play with something because it is for boys. Perhaps she is speaking of how she wanted to play cowboys but was not allowed because she is a girl. Either way you read the title; the story is of a woman who was told that she could not be something.
50
Womanhood
51
52
Each artist deals with telling a story in their work, in Tania Franco Klein’s work we see the story of a collection of tired women who are all exhausted from performing for others around them. In Gillian Wearing’s work we see a family who has been stripped back to before their familial roles and then we focus on Wearing herself, a young girl that is scared of what the world will think of her and is taking a moment to see what she looks like through the eyes of someone else. Calypso’s work tells the story of a tired woman who takes control of her life to perform for herself. While Niemi’s work shows us a woman who was forced into one life while she dreamed of reaching out to grasp another. Each artist created work that spoke of how women are forced to perform but they all spoke of different parts of that life.
53
They all took a part of womanhood and stripped it down, Klein and Wearing describe realistic story while Calypso and Niemi took it to a more narrative story. The word womanhood has a remarkably simple meaning, but hundreds of connotations attached to it, a woman has to meet each role required of her and is in a state of near constant performance. The way that the artists portray this constant performance and worry is unique to each project. The slip of a mask in Tania Franco Klein’s work paired with the literal masks featured in Gillian Wearing and Juno Calypso’s work. The denied woman in Anja Niemi’s photographs partnered with the confident Joyce in Calypso’s work tell two halves of the same story. They both feature a woman who is unhappy in her life due to the way that people are treating her, while one resolves the issue on her own and the other dreams about what could have been. 54
Bibliography Merriam-webster.com. n.d. Definition Of WOMANHOOD. [online] Available at: <https://www.merriam-webster.com/ dictionary/womanhood#:~:text=1a%20%3A%20the%20 state%20of,a%20woman%20or%20of%20womankind> [Accessed 18 December 2020] The Guardian. (2012). Gillian Wearing Takeover: Behind The Mask – The Self Portraits. [online] Available at: <https:// www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2012/mar/27/ gillian-wearing-takeover-mask> [Accessed 20 December 2020] Academic.oup.com. (2007). FEMINISM, AGING, AND THE LIFE COURSE PERSPECTIVE: Robert H. Binstock, Phd, Editor. [online] Available at: <https://academic.oup.com/gerontologist/article/47/5/705/718728> [Accessed 07 January 2021] The Guardian. (2015). Juno Calypso’s One-Woman World Tour Of Honeymoon Hotels. [online] Available at: <https:// www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/jul/02/juno-calypso-tour-honeymoon-hotels> [Accessed 22 January 2021]
55
Connelly, L. and Connelly, L., (2018). Anja Niemi’s She Could Have Been A Cowboy. [online] Creative Boom. Available at: <https://www.creativeboom.com/inspiration/anja-niemisphotography-series-she-could-have-been-a-cowboy-exploresfemininity/> [Accessed 22 January 2021] Images found at Tania Franco Klein. n.d. Our Life In The Shadows — Tania Franco Klein. [online] Available at: <https://www.taniafrancoklein.com/gallerypm> [Accessed 11 December 2020] The Guardian. (2012). Gillian Wearing Takeover: Behind The Mask – The Self Portraits. [online] Available at: <https:// www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2012/mar/27/gillian-wearing-takeover-mask> [Accessed 20 December 2020] junocalypso. n.d. junocalypso. [online] Available at: <https:// www.junocalypso.com/> [Accessed 14 December 2020]. ANJA NIEMI. n.d. SHE COULD HAVE BEEN A COWBOY — ANJA NIEMI. [online] Available at: <https://www.anjaniemiphotography.com/shecouldhavebeenacowboy> [Accessed 28 January 2021].
56
Womanhood
Womanhood